By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Exile in Happy Valley
I’ve long considered myself to be a feminist, even before I realized I was trans. It’s always seemed like basic common sense to me that people shouldn’t be defined by the contents of their genitalia but by the quality of their character. Regardless of where you stand on rape culture or abortion or Hillary goddamn Clinton, that’s really what it all comes down to. That and realizing the basic fact that our society treats women and anyone perceived as feminine like second class citizens at best. If you ask most people, left, right, or center, on these basic realities of American life, they’ll generally (if begrudgingly) agree with you. Then why is feminism still such a controversial subject? Try casually mentioning it on almost any given message board and count the seconds before a dozen trolls threaten to rape and gut you and leave you for dead by the highway. Seriously, fucking try it. I have. The very word feminism seems to bring the worst out of people online.
And the tough medicine is that this happens on both ends of the spectrum. The lion share of people actually willing to declare themselves feminists online seem more concerned with self-righteous virtue signaling than equality. Even with all their bluster, most cyber-feminists seem to work very hard to mirror the vitriolic hate-fuckery of the weirdly rape obsessed sexist troglodytes of the “Men’s Movement”. The only thing rarer than an open feminist online seems to be an open feminist who doesn’t feel entitled to instruct other people on how to live their lives, like some role-crazy guidance counselor with a yard stick up their ass. I’m sure a lot of this ugliness is just the action-reaction-action of two camps of morons feeding off the fumes of one another’s farts but in spite of what my birth certificate says, I am not a man. I am a feminist. So I can only do my best to answer for the foibles of my own movement. I can only ask, what happened to us? How did we get from basic bare bones human equality to this shit show of cunt on cunt cyber violence? Why do all feminists get treated like shit? And, perhaps more important, why do so many feminists treat anyone who disagrees with them like shit? We can’t blame it all on men.
In my view, a lot of this trouble seems to go back to Second Wave Feminism. The First Wave of Feminism was as radical as it was diverse. The movement was multiracial, largely middle class, and included everything from conservative pro-life Quakers to free loving individualist anarchists. They all came together against the common foe of patriarchy, supporting equal parenting and property rights and, above all else, suffrage. Most of them were also veteran abolitionists and played major roles in nearly every revolutionary movement of the 19th and early 20th century.